King County handled the Nov. 8 election well despite major challenges, and the county elections department has moved aggressively to improve its operations, an outside review team says.

The county's physical setup for processing votes presents the biggest obstacle to smoothly functioning elections, with the work scattered among four main sites, the review by observers from the non-profit Election Center says. The most pressing need for the elections department is to consolidate its operations in one facility, the team's report says.

"We observed a good election, conducted under extremely difficult circumstances -- multiple facilities, a changing work force and intense public scrutiny," the three-member team said. "The (King County) elections section has reason to be proud of the progress that has been made." But, the report says, "consolidation is critical to an efficient, accurate, secure and transparent election."

With the work on elections taking place in several different buildings miles apart, "we observed many processes that require an incredible amount of duplication, added quality control, transportation, increased staffing and security," the team reports.

The call for a consolidated facility is nothing new. Last summer, the Citizens'Election Oversight Committee, which was impaneled by the County Council earlier in the year to review elections operations, urged the council to back a proposal from County Executive Ron Sims to purchase a former garment factory at 1130 Rainier Ave. S. as a centralized elections headquarters.

But the council balked at the projected $22.8 million cost of the purchase and renovation, and it rejected the deal. A search for an alternative centralized site is in the works.

For the November election, the elections department took over a county building at 9010 East Marginal Way S. in Tukwila for processing absentee ballots. Those ballots were actually counted on machines in a leased building at 3901 First Ave. S., Seattle.

Polling-place ballots and poll-site counting machines were distributed from a warehouse at 1215 E. Fir. St. in Seattle, where some post-election ballot-handling also took place. Provisional ballots were sent for researching to the King County Administration Building at 500 Fourth Ave. in Seattle, which also houses the department's administrative offices.

The Election Center, a nationwide association of elections officials based in Houston, was commissioned by the County Council to examine the elections department in the aftermath of the troubled November 2004 election, which included absentee ballots overlooked and left out of the tally, provisional ballots counted without the required validation beforehand, felons voting illegally and other mistakes.

The oversight committee is conducting a second review of the department, and a third was undertaken by a Sims-appointed task force that issued its report in July.

Republicans put the foul-ups in King County at the heart of their legal challenge to Democrat Christine Gregoire's narrow victory in the 2004 governor's race, but a judge rejected their case in June.

Last week, the oversight committee said King County should conduct its elections almost exclusively by mail ballots, with limited provisions for polling-place voting.

That change, which was also recommended by the task force, would bring King County in line with most other counties in the state. All-mail voting was authorized as a county option by the 2005 Legislature; in King County, it would require council approval.

More than 70 percent of the county's voters in the November 2005 election cast ballots by mail, but the county still operated more than 500 polling places for the others.

"Being able to do one type of election, and being able to focus on that, is better," said Evelyn Arnold, a non-voting member of the committee who is the Republican auditor in Chelan County, which has adopted all-mail voting.

In light of the improved performance of the elections department, the oversight committee also questioned the usefulness of the key recommendation of the task force: that Sims hire an outside "turnaround team" to shake up the agency and cure its ailing workplace culture. "I think there's a genuine risk of a turnaround (team) scuttling every bit of incremental progress that we've made," committee member Joan Thomas of the League of Women Voters said.

The turnaround team's authority vis-à-vis elections director Dean Logan is unclear, and although members of the team observed the Nov. 8 vote, only part of the team's estimated total cost of more than $1 million has been earmarked by the council for the job. The oversight committee is scheduled to make its final report by Feb. 1.